How To Unlock Your Apple iPhone X - Just Stare At It

Published September 13th at 12:47pm

Apple has said goodbye to fingerprint scanning and adopted new facial recognition biometrics on their flagship iPhone X. In a quest to find a convenient but secure way to unlock your iPhone, Apple has replaced TouchID (#RIPHomeButton) with FaceID, where your face acts as the password.

It works by using the iPhone’s front-facing camera to register your facial structure, so unless you have an identical twin, nobody else will be able to unlock yours. It adds the convenience of not having to lift a finger to unlock your iPhone and Apple say FaceID is 20 times more secure than TouchID.

"With the iPhone X, your iPhone is locked until you look at it and it recognizes you. Nothing has ever been more simple, natural, and effortless." Apple exec Phil Schiller said at the launch keynote yesterday. This feature will also be integrated beyond the lock screen for downloading new apps and approving transactions through Apple Pay.

Facial recognition technology has had its fair share of testing and has long been notoriously easy to defeat. However Apple has overcome this challenge by using an infrared system they are calling TrueDepth, which essentially projects 30,000 invisible dots onto the user’s face making it much harder to spoof than previous iterations of facial recognition.

That being said… Marc Rogers, a security researcher at Cloudflare insists that it is not impossible for someone to crack FaceID and all they will need is a 3D-printed image of the user’s head. We won’t know really how secure this software is until troublemakers such as Rogers get a chance to publically test it.

Biometric security is truly making a step forward providing a unique identifier and more convenient methods for consumers to log into their laptops and smartphones. Gone are the days of just relying on passwords and pins which are easier for cyber criminals to obtain compared to fingerprints and facial features.